Complex Dynamic Lists: Your Order Please

Help your site’s visitors reach their goals quickly with a dynamic menu that takes its cue from the Mac OS X Finder.

Heilmann, Christian. List Apart, A (2005). Design>Web Design>User Interface>DHTML

Dynamically Conjuring Drop-Down Navigation

Got content? Got pages and pages of content? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could offer your readers a drop-down menu providing instant access to any page, without having to sit down and program the darned thing? By marrying a seemingly forgotten XHTML element to simple, drop-in JavaScript, Christian Heilmann shows how to do just that. There’s even a PHP backup for those whose browsers lack access to JavaScript. Turn on, tune in, drop-down.

Heilmann, Christian. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>User Interface>DHTML

The Importance of Maintainable JavaScript

JavaScript is hip again; there’s no doubt about it. But if you’re starting to get down and dirty with it, there’s no excuse not to keep it clean.

Heilmann, Christian. Vitamin (2008). Articles>Web Design>Programming>JavaScript

JavaScript Image Replacement

Fahrner Image Replacement (FIR), a technique developed to allow designers to use image-based typesetting while meeting accessibility requirements, only serves its intended purpose when screen readers misbehave. By using JavaScript, we have an opportunity none of these solutions give us.

Heilmann, Christian. List Apart, A (2003). Design>Web Design>DHTML

The Table Ruler

Make your site easier to use by giving your visitors a virtual 'ruler' to guide and track their progress down long data tables. With a pinch of JavaScript and a dash of the DOM, your table rows will light up as your visitors hover over them.

Heilmann, Christian. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>Usability

The HTML HEAD Element

This article deals with a part of the HTML document that does not get the attention it deserves: the markup that goes inside the head element. By the end of this tutorial you’ll have learnt about the different parts of this section and what they all do, including the doctype, title element, keywords and description (which are handled by meta elements).

Heilmann, Christian. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>HTML>Metadata

The Business Case for Web Standards

A wiki to facilitate the collation of arguments and counterarguments in favor of web standards, and to sort them into the different categories of who we want to persuade.

Heilmann, Christian. Business Case for Web Standards, The (2007). Resources>Web Design>Standards>Business Case

The Seven Rules of Unobtrusive JavaScript

I've found the following rules over the years developing, teaching and implementing JavaScript in an unobtrusive manner. They have specifically been the outline of a workshop on unobtrusive JavaScript for the Paris Web conference 2007 in Paris, France.I hope that they help you understand a bit why it is a good idea to plan and execute your JavaScript in this way. It has helped me deliver products faster, with much higher quality and a lot easier maintenance.

Heilmann, Christian. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>JavaScript

Free Your Embedded Data With SearchMonkey

Arguing for web standards and semantically clean and rich websites is an uphill battle. For years we had to deal with browsers that needed us to mess around with HTML just to display a document in several columns and the visual outcome was much more important than the structure.

Heilmann, Christian. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML

Ten Reasons Clients Don't Care About Accessibility

Working as an accessibility consultant in an IT company is a very frustrating job right now. Highly publicized lawsuits and deep-rooted accessibility myths leave us with a lot to explain when the final product does not really help visitors. Our clients simply don’t care about accessibility as much as we’d like them to, and there are several reasons for that.

Heilmann, Christian. Digital Web Magazine (2005). Articles>Consulting>Accessibility>Web Design

Seven Accessibility Mistakes (Part 1)

There are several reasons inaccessible Web products get published. One we discussed in my last article is that some clients just don’t care about accessibility. Their reasons make a lot of sense if you put yourself in their shoes. Another reason is developer mistakes. Making mistakes is natural, and suffering the consequences and learning from them is what makes us better developers and better people.

Heilmann, Christian. Digital Web Magazine (2006). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Case Studies

Seven Accessibility Mistakes (Part 2)

This two part-article discusses reasons why some projects fail to result in properly accessible products.

Heilmann, Christian. Digital Web Magazine (2006). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility